It’s not easy being green.

Technology is an incredible thing; the speed at which it advances and changes often amazes us, especially if you fall into the category of a self proclaimed techie lover, we love to think back and remember the first computer we ever owned that had 16 kilobytes of ram and a 6mhz processor and were amazed at what you could accomplish with such a small amount of random access memory, and which back then seemed almost ludicrous that you would ever need any more, oh how times have changed.

Electronics today are vastly more complex and contain a lot more components, that can perform things that 25 years ago would have made you think you were in some kind of wildly exaggerated sci-fi movie, alas it’s true we’ve become a world so dependent on electronic devices and pushing manufacturers to make their devices perform even more and more functions which has led to an impact on energy production and high energy consumption.

The energy efficiency scale used on electrical devices today.

What is also happening in the world is a new understanding of energy use and the effect we’re having on our planet, this is a new driving force getting everyone to do their part in saving energy or being green as it’s commonly known. Being Green is the new buzz word on the street and everyone is keen on becoming a part of the energy saving club.

What does this mean for our electronic devices, well for example all the electronic devices that use batteries, today we demand our battery powered devices to be able to perform a large range of tasks and to last a long time, take for example mobile phones, ten years ago the most you could do with a mobile phone was make a phone call and send a text message, this didn’t demand much from the battery manufacturers who also had more room to house their batteries since the phones were rather large compared to today’s phones, compare that phone to a common mobile phone today, which can now make calls, send many different type of messages, take photos, play music and display web pages to name just a few, the demands now on the battery manufacturers are a lot higher because we expect a long lasting battery that can power all these functions. To accommodate the drive for more power battery models are constantly being replaced with more powerful versions. This causes a problem with correctly disposing of old batteries as high energy costs and power wastage.

So this pushes things back the other way, we go back to the electronic component manufacturers and chip designers to develop their products to be more energy efficient, by driving down the energy requirements to power the many different electronic components for a device, without compromising functionality we reduce the requirements for the constant replacement of batteries. Component manufacturers are now taking a green view on new part development and making technology advances to be able to manufacture their products using the theory of doing more with less energy.